Choosing the Right Marketing Automation Platform
Marketing automation (MA) can help any business streamline the marketing process, and you must consider it if you want to stay competitive. Simply said, marketing automation means automating repetitive tasks in customer-facing processes, tracking their interactions, and providing records of customer information and status.
How do you choose the right marketing automation platform? Instead of settling for a standard solution with subpar features, you may want to find a platform built around your marketing strategy and workflows that’s easy to implement and use and at a reasonable total cost of ownership (TCO).
6 Reasons You Should Consider Marketing Automation
It is important to ensure the solution you’re considering makes sense for your marketing funnel. To ensure a personalized experience, we have compiled an entire list of six common reasons marketers cite when engaging in the buying process of new marketing technology.
- No sales and marketing alignment—due to the lack of native integration between marketing automation and CRM software
Transmitting information in real-time can help your marketing department and sales teams communicate better by keeping everyone on the same page throughout the conversion process.
Integrating your marketing automation platform and CRM system and enabling your data to pass seamlessly between the two systems is essential to reaching your marketing goals. A tight integration throughout the entire process helps your sales and marketing teams align their strategy and goals, which means greater productivity and ultimately more revenue for your company.
Marketing automation software like Sugar Market natively integrates with more CRMs than any other marketing automation platform: Sugar Sell, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Infor, Sage, NetSuite, and Bullhorn.
- Unable to prioritize or qualify leads for sales without manual work and continuous maintenance
Most users don’t become customers overnight. You may nurture the user experience through marketing campaigns, and you can create a variety of conversions along the sales funnel based on each stage of the customer journey (i.e., give them a coupon, ask them to sign up for an email newsletter).
Sugar Market takes the guesswork out of lead scoring with reliable lead qualification and prioritization based on actual engagement and its measured contribution to conversion rates. Market’s advanced features accurately predict your leads’ likelihood of converting to marketing qualified leads (MQL) and flags prospects to prioritize.
- Continuously rising costs—due to expensive add-ons, upgrades, and support fees.
The cost you pay for your marketing automation tool varies from one provider to another. Check pricing and make sure it can adapt to your business’s ups and downs caused by market trends. Even if the limits sound more than you need right now, think long-term, and don’t forget you need a platform that can grow with you. Adopters of marketing automation should look out for extra costs for features you thought they’re included in the initial price, like support, upgrade fees, and per-user charges.
- Wasting budget on an expensive platform but only using its basic features
Don’t get excited by the long list of advanced automation features and functions some providers might include in their offers. There is a good chance you’ll never have to use them all.
The first thing you should do is evaluate the complete picture of the broader commercial impact of the implementation. Consider if your company is ready to adopt the business model required to use those additional features and prioritize them in a list.
- Poor adoption rates—nobody wants to use a tool that only adds more daily work
Even though marketing automation is about making marketing “automated,” users still need to set up campaign assets, scoring profiles, and lead management rules.
For a successful marketing automation implementation, ensure that all departments involved are onboard. Point out how it makes their work easier and be prepared to answer their questions. The more research you can do about the benefits of marketing automation in general, the more you know how it can support your business development.
- No support for personalized campaigns and multi-channel marketing
Your prospects engage with you on multiple channels, and you need a reliable tool to map their buying journey so that you can address them efficiently further on to improve the customer experience.
With inbound and outbound email marketing tools, social media management capabilities, AI-driven predictive analytics, and even Google Ads management tools, Market has you covered for all your marketing channel needs in one simple to use cloud solution.
Closing Thoughts
The fact that 77% of users reported increased conversions after adopting marketing automation software is encouraging. Switching to marketing automation empowers your business with a customer engagement-focused approach to building and growing customer relationships.
If you want to work smarter and not harder, take a look at our guide—you’ll find more relevant information on key points you should consider when choosing the right marketing automation platform for your conversion optimization needs.
